1- DirectX is free. Developers pay nothing. You are free to download the sdk if you want and read the license agreement and develop a commercial game in the process if you so desire.

2- I never ever said the people developing the OS should not be paid. For all I care MS or any other company for that matter could be hired to develop the OS, as long as the OS is developed under the organization's rules and standards and is free to use. Companies, institutions and governments wanting to be members would obviously contribute with fees, which is no different than what happens with OpenGL/OpenCL, JEDEC and recently HSA foundation. Just because something is non-profit it doesn't mean its employees are not paid. It only means it's purpose is not to profit from its operation.

3- I already infered that Windows and other "OS" are more than OS, they are software packages that include many basic applications, such as file manager (win explorer). So basically you are repeating what I actually said. Free OS (kernel and little more), standardized so that it's easy to develop software for. Software companies would develop the apps , including the basic apps that we're used to see included in the OS package, and charge for them as usual. So for example you would be able to choose from several file managers. And there would be a helluva number of free/open programs too.

4- I didn't say OpenGL is inferior in any way. In fact I was infering the opposite and pretty much saying what you said.

5- I realize all this imposible in current world and that it is basically what Linux is and has been trying to do.

EDIT: just remembered:

6- It's a duopoly. Linux has around 1% of the market and is not dominant in any way or form. A duopoly is that market that is dominated by 2 suppliers.

Myself, I'm retrograde. I buy most games years after they are out, and on DVD. I've gotten Fear and Crysis on DVD. They've all been gifted to others with no problem. I did not charge a dime. Do they care? Yes, if they read this.

The trend is towards "subscription" software. Get used to it, it will only get worse.

Valve does what it wants to because it can. People still want to play the games, and Valve still wants control of the rights and future income. I don't like it, but in the "cloud" it's the natural progression.

1- DirectX is free. Developers pay nothing. You are free to download the sdk if you want and read the license agreement and develop a commercial game in the process if you so desire.

2- I never ever said the people developing the OS should not be paid. For all I care MS or any other company for that matter could be hired to develop the OS, as long as the OS is developed under the organization's rules and standards and is free to use. Companies, institutions and governments wanting to be members would obviously contribute with fees, which is no different than what happens with OpenGL/OpenCL, JEDEC and recently HSA foundation. Just because something is non-profit it doesn't mean its employees are not paid. It only means it's purpose is not to profit from its operation.

3- I already infered that Windows and other "OS" are more than OS, they are software packages that include many basic applications, such as file manager (win explorer). So basically you are repeating what I actually said. Free OS (kernel and little more), standardized so that it's easy to develop software for. Software companies would develop the apps , including the basic apps that we're used to see included in the OS package, and charge for them as usual. So for example you would be able to choose from several file managers. And there would be a helluva number of free/open programs too.

4- I didn't say OpenGL is inferior in any way. In fact I was infering the opposite and pretty much saying what you said.

5- I realize all this imposible in current world and that it is basically what Linux is and has been trying to do.

EDIT: just remembered:

6- It's a duopoly. Linux has around 1% of the market and is not dominant in any way or form. A duopoly is that market that is dominated by 2 suppliers.

Click to expand...

Pay for file managers? Are you really suggesting that somebody could take a vanilla manager, change colors and patterns, then resell it and make a profit? Is that any sort of a step forward?

I too think that OS should be free. The reason is that this way it could be just one single OS for everyone, without the drawbacks (understatement) of a monopoly. Consumer wins and software developers win (except MS and Apple), because they only have to support a single ecosystem.

Ideally it would be developed and mantained by a non-profit organization, in which software developers would form part of a comitee, but that would be about as much control as they would have.

Click to expand...

You want a monopoly, controlled by developers. Is that an improvement over the developers at Apple and MS? Do you really want to "stop" a monopoly by installing another monopoly? Have I read the words incorrectly, or are you perhaps saying something that I have missed?

Perhaps you could put a coherent and developed idea forward. I see excellent points, but no ideological base to string everything into a coherent whole. Kreij was hitting the nail on the head with your earlier assertions. You've got a nice idea, but nothing to follow it through with.

You want a single OS, but don't address the fact that a lack of competition will cause stagnation. In your words:

Except there's no competition. And competition is overrated anyway. The only thing that competition brought to Windows is Metro UI and Windows Store, both of which are terrible for the end user. So let me simply wholeheartedly and completely disagree.

By your definition every standard is a bad idea. On certain things I agree, push from companies is necessary and without them the standard stagnates. On the most basic levels like an OS tho, I don't agree at all...

Click to expand...

Standards are good. Kreij simply wanted to point out the obvious. Of course, competition has never bred anything interesting. I mean, what do we need GUIs, optimized code, office applications (word and excel), e-mail, browsers, and the internet for. I mean, all I should have ever needed was MSDOS.

Has the point sunk in yet, or do I have to cover of the Apple vs. MS competition?

Let's cover what you're asking for and what you've added to the discussion.

You want free software, but don't give people a way to make a living doing the actual coding.

You imply that developers are part of the reason that software isn't yet open source, but you don't offer a way to convert them to your ideas.

You cling to the idea of two OSes. For the record, Windows and OSX are the two most popular OSes in the consumer world; Windows and Linux are the driving forces in the server world. Online games need servers to function, thus if you ever want Linux to thrive you have to place the horse (servers) in front of the cart (consumers) to get anything to move.

Now all of the ideas are nice. A free OS, people all driving forward to better software, and even compatibility being 100%. Reality is where your ideas are failing. Give me a coherent and reasoned plan as to how this works, and then let's pick each others ideas apart and create something better from the remains. Otherwise, your desire for something from nothing is best left to the alchemists among us... That is why I have a problem. I have no right to speak for Kreij, but given the fact that he codes I'd think that some of my points might resonate.

I was wrong. It is not charged for by developers. The internal documents say the license is provided free with a windows license. In legalese: NOT FREE, because you have to buy windows. If you'd like to argue that it could theoretically run on Linux I'm sure the lawyers at MS would like to sue you into oblivion.

I'm not going to bother responding to all that crap. You're not interested in what I'm saying, just on what your demented mind thinks I'm saying and then you want to throw out all that bullshit. Not interested.

I'm just going to say 2 things.

You need a Windows license for ANY software created for Windows. That says nothing as to whether is free or not. Duh. :shadedshu

And how can something "controled" by every software developer and hardware vendor be a monopoly??? Are you demented or what?? I guess that the parliament is a dictatorship too?? :shadedshu

EDIT a hint: using big bold letters don't make your point any more valid, nor makes you more intelligent, quite the opposite, in fact.

The market is driven by the consumer. If most consumers did the same as Sasqui, there wouldn't be a "problem". Steam would be an afterthought and we would have DVD'd to freely trade/sell to others.

Click to expand...

You remind me a guy back in the usenet days (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action) that when Steam launched he said it was the devil and started his crusade. We laughed back then.
At the end, WE decided to make Steam/Amazon/etc rich and send the brick and mortar games shop to unemployment.

You remind me a guy back in the usenet days (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action) that when Steam launched he said it was the devil and started his crusade. We laughed back then.
At the end, WE decided to make Steam/Amazon/etc rich and send the brick and mortar games shop to unemployment.

Click to expand...

Yep, so we shouldn't blame the one's providing these services by having lawsuits and passing laws, rather we shouldn't be using these services. This, in a way is democracy at work. People are choosing for themselves what to use and are becoming or already are the majority.

Governments taking corporations to court due to the results of the will of the majority of the people isn't democracy.

Edit:
You know what? I can't keep quiet. You don't have the balls to say where you're from, but show disdain for a whole country. You blast Americans for having no faith in our elected officials, coming a step away from calling us stupid for this lack of faith in a voluntary monopoly of governance. You don't even respond to reasonable points, and consider everything said by someone who holds a different view as noise. I admit to being somewhat of a prick. You are beyond that. You are acting as a troll. If you can't be held responsible for your words, and hold no value in the words of others, I'm done speaking at you.

I'm obviously only going to respond to 1, 2 and 3. And I'm being generous considering your tone and the fact that you are making up what I said.

1- Government by representation is monopoly... no comment.

2- It's been done before. I'm not presenting any novel or undone idea. Read on Khronos Group, JEDEC. You should have done it before. Anyway how much of that representing happens right now? Hmm? Failed logic to assume that some control is worse than none at all... same for the "Who gets to be on the developing team."

3- I didn't say competition has done nothing, so you are making things up again and having a conversation against your own deluded mind. I said that competition in OS has done very little for the consumer lately (consumer understood as TPU user, gamer, enthusiast). And saying that there's cometition in the consumer OS scene is laughable anyway. Windows represents 90% of the market and 100% of the gaming interested market. It's a full blown monopoly for people like me and I assume 95% of TPU users. Only "competition" comes from Apple (Linux represents less than 1% of market), who does not sell nor legally allow the installation of their OS in anything but Apple branded hardware. So again no options if you want to build your own PC for gaming.

Also: the things you mentioned in the sentence culminated with big bold letters (especially internet) have absolutly NOTHING (should I use big bold letters so that you can understand this, pal?) to do with 1) the OS and 2) especifically Windows. It's end user software and were all created and promoted by 3rd party software developers. Yes, yes those same people to which I want to give more power and make things easy and cheap to develop, so that the cost of entering is not astronomical as it is now. So that there's more options, so that there's more novelty and innovation, so hat there's more COMPETITION where it actually matters.

5- And ok I ended up tempted to respond to this point because it always makes me laugh so hard. Typical assumption from US citicen, that an elected government body is worse than a company, over which no one has control and which has its own interests to begin with. That somehow a company better represents their needs than even the government they themselves elected. Only in the USA you can hear such an absurdity. Right now who makes the rules? (regarding OS development) And how is it that he/she represents better your needs than an elected body?

I seem to remember both Apple and Microsoft fighting the same battle in the EU and winning. Basically if you buy the digital content and the condition is already set that you can't resell it, then it is fine. However, they can't sell you digital content without specifying you can't resell it, and then change things so you can't resell it after the purchase.

Has anyone ever SEEN a pirated disc of any kind of game[im not talking joe blo at home], at any sort of shop/ market/ wherever??? in there lifetime, because i havent, ever, and ive been playing games for 25+ years now, on consoles, comps ,etc.
[be honest please]

second question------- what happened to the days when, you bought a new game, took it home, put it in dvd drive, and 20 mins later, you were playing it???? and if you had to patch, it was usually not more than a gig, often much less, so howcome im buying new games now, and having to patch 1-2-3-4 gig of data, on double, and even triple disc titles???????

Has anyone ever SEEN a pirated disc of any kind of game[im not talking joe blo at home], at any sort of shop/ market/ wherever??? in there lifetime, because i havent, ever, and ive been playing games for 25+ years now, on consoles, comps ,etc.
[be honest please]

second question------- what happened to the days when, you bought a new game, took it home, put it in dvd drive, and 20 mins later, you were playing it???? and if you had to patch, it was usually not more than a gig, often much less, so howcome im buying new games now, and having to patch 1-2-3-4 gig of data, on double, and even triple disc titles???????

I appreciate your honesty, in those countries, are there still heaps of pirated media to this day, if so, then stopping pirating has failed anyway,

and my point is, [second q] if the game is taking up 2-3 discs, and we are paying 60-70-80-+$, then why should we have to update up to 5 gig download on top of that to get to play[and u cant if u dont]

I just reinstalled "origin" to play bf3, 5.5 gig update on top of 2 disc install, to my mind, thats just criminal really. should be ready by tomorrow arvo lol.

@mediasorcerer;
There are a few resons why large downloads pre-install may be required.
1) In the past, when people everywhere had rotten internet connections, if developers needed to fix a file they would send you a small tidy executable that would inject the code into the existing local file that needed to be fixed. Now you get the whole file because it's easier for them than writing custom injection code. Multiply the file sizes by the number of files that were fixed and you can see where things get large quick.
2) Assets. In interviews with Bethesda's Pete hines, he commented that they had a heck of a time getting all of the assets for Skyrim on one disk due to the sheer amount of audio data. They wrote custom compression routines in order to facilitate that. They still released their graphics upgrade as a download, because ...
3) The new assetts were not released with the original disks and other than sending everyone who owns the game a new disk (a logistical nightmare) the only option is make it available for download.

Tack on the fact that in many cases they really want everyone playing with the same code base for troubleshooting/support reasons they require the updates. Which makes sense to me.

It is a PITA, but in the end you should end up with a better playing (and looking) game which is what every gamer wants and is to their advantage to put up with the large dowloads.

On topic : I still think Steam letting people auction their used games is a good idea. Let the gamers decide how much they will pay for a used copy and both Valve and the Devs can get a piece of the pie.

@Mediasorcerer;
There are a few resons why large downloads pre-install may be required.
1) In the past, when people everywhere had rotten internet connections, if developers needed to fix a file they would send you a small tidy executable that would inject the code into the existing local file that needed to be fixed. Now you get the whole file because it's easier for them than writing custom injection code. Multiply the file sizes by the number of files that were fixed and you can see where things get large quick.
2) Assets. In interviews with Bethesda's Pete hines, he commented that they had a heck of a time getting all of the assets for Skyrim on one disk due to the sheer amount of audio data. They wrote custom compression routines in order to facilitate that. They still released their graphics upgrade as a download, because ...
3) The new assetts were not released with the original disks and other than sending everyone who owns the game a new disk (a logistical nightmare) the only option is make it available for download.

Tack on the fact that in many cases they really want everyone playing with the same code base for troubleshooting/support reasons they require the updates. Which makes sense to me.

It is a PITA, but in the end you should end up with a better playing (and looking) game which is what every gamer wants and is to their advantage to put up with the large dowloads.

On topic : I still think Steam letting people auction their used games is a good idea. Let the gamers decide how much they will pay for a used copy and both Valve and the Devs can get a piece of the pie.

Click to expand...

Id like to give you a warm thankyou for taking the time to explain that to me, it has eased the pain of my adsl 1 only internet connect i have here out of town, and after reading your level headed and thorough explanation, i dont feel so "burnt" at having to wait twelve or more hrs for the 5.4 gb update/patch/whatever of bf3 to install on my new rigg before i can play, now, if only i can sleep through the constant subliminal hum of my computer fans whirring at low rpm,s all night, should be fun tomorrow night firing up bf3 again lol, hehehe!!

And yes, definately should be able to auction our games, perhaps an email to steam suggesting as much? ive emailed many companies including ms and apple among others before,[ i use particularly refined english when i do] and almost always received responses, sometimes from senior people too, about things like this.
[no harm in trying?]

So the ten million (or billion, or whatever the used game market actually represents) dollar question is, can we make a plan and get Valve involved.

The concerns are simple, but I've yet to hear a reasonable solution. As I'm inclined to think, we've got to address:
1) How do we confirm that a digital copy has been removed?
-Answered by constant checking, like Steam and Origin do-

2) How do we price games?
-Companies like Gamestop have figured this out, but they exist in a vacuum. Digital distribution doesn't exist there, so game prices have to be more dynamic. How do you make pricing fair?-

3) Who sets the price of games?
-A gift of an older game to someone else might be free with traditional media. How do you prevent "free" gifts, that are then paid for outside of the digital domain?-

4) How do old games get sold?
-Direct sales from friends? A marketplace? An auction house? Something I'm not capable of currently conceiving?-

5) How do the profits, and there needs to be profits, get divvied up?
-Do you kill the developers old argument of "we don't see a penny from trade-ins?" Does Valve consider this a subsequent service and keep the developers out of the loop like what currently occurs?

6) How does this work with regional games?
-In third world countries the price of things generally drops. What's to prevent an account in say South Africa from buying 100 copies of a game at $30, reselling them at $40, and the purchase price would have been $50 (so developers and Valve are cheated out of money)?

Answer the remaining 5 questions, and Valve will probably listen. Honestly, I don't know how to do it. I'd like to be able to resell games, and even give some away that I can no longer enjoy. It seems like the that would be easy, but everyone needs to make a profit. For the time being, it seems like TRWOV has the only right idea. Separate accounts for separate games, that can later be sold without getting Valve involved. It's not exactly following the spirit of the system, but it is shrewd and effective. Kudos.

Edit: Well I feel foolish. I forgot the big one, and mediasorcerer pointed it out.
7) If digital media cannot technically be "used," what incentive exists to buy it a such?
-The digital copy might be bought and sold 100 times. It is still as good as they day it was coded. How do you address the new copy="used" copy conundrum?

Good questions Hass
Since we are talking about Steam I will respond in regards to their current setup.

#1) When someone sells a game on Steam their local cache is deleted and the game removed from their library.

#2) We don't, we let the market decide the price.

#3) See #2 for pricing. No gifting allowed once a game is in your library. You can only sell it.

#4) I like the auction idea as it prevents friend-to-friend circumvention of the "rules".

#5) Good question. Not sure on that.

#6) Since you can only put one copy of a game in your library, no one can buy 100 copies. When the game is sold, the game is removed from the original owner and they buyer downlods the game from their region. Once a game is sold you can't buy it again as you are basically saying "I'm done with it" and it gets locked out of your library. They could also set a time period after purchasing a game when it cannot be sold, so it would be difficult, and not worth the effort, for people to create accounts for the sole purpose of resale.